ICBA celebrates 50 years of serving open shop construction this year, and we are looking back every week at some of the significant moments, milestones, and people who helped ICBA become Canada’s largest construction association.
Today, we wind the clock back to 1983…
Downtown Kamloops. A Kamloops provincial politician.
Not usually a place – or a person – you see burned in effigy. But the early 1980s were a wild time, and the building trades unions were too often aggressive and brutal. And they decided Claude Richmond, a radio station manager turned MLA, had gone too far when his Social Credit government awarded a contract to build a new local courthouse to Kerkhoff & Sons Construction.
Claude Richmond
“They got a big crane and parked it up on Columbia Street where the courthouse was going to be built,” Richmond recalled. “A huge crane, and they hung me in effigy with a plastic trumpet because I played the trumpet. And they burned it – they burned my effigy. They put a torch to it. I thought, ‘I’ve got it made.’”
The irony? Richmond had nothing to do with the contract award. But his office was picketed, and he had a tense meeting with union leaders at the David Thompson Hotel, during which he says he made his own views on the matter clear. “For some reason, you people think that you have a divine right to build anything bigger than a house or a three-storey walk-up,” he told them. “Well, I don’t think that’s the case. I think Mr. Kerkhoff has the expertise to build this thing.”
Bill Kerkhoff, the most recognizable face of the open shop construction sector, absolutely had the expertise.
He was a veteran of years of efforts by the building trades unions and their supporters to disrupt his work and his livelihood, including a Kelowna high rise project he had just completed. He had been both celebrated by free enterprisers and vilified by the building trades union bosses. In naming his company their business of the year in 1984, B.C. Business said he had “unleashed forces that even this mildly spoken 34-year-old probably never suspected existed: forces of venom, hate, physical abuse, admiration, stoicism and bewilderment.” Terming him a “reluctant hero,” the magazine said he was “the most redoubtable warrior with which the union movement has had to contend in modern times.”
But it was pure business that led him to pursue the courthouse contract. His company was shifting focus to public work at a time when the market for private construction was hurting, and when contractors faced higher risks on the private work that was available. “It was survival,” Kerkhoff said. He had also successfully completed some smaller public sector work, although he’d been turned down on another large provincial contract a few months prior. The courthouse job felt like a longshot, but in late January 1983, the B.C. Building Corporation accepted Kerkhoff’s low bid on the five-story, 150,000 square foot structure of $12.9 million, despite lobbying by both the building trades and unionized contractors. It was the largest and most sophisticated public contract yet to be go non-union, and well above a $5 million threshold that the unions claimed should mark their exclusive domain.
Kamloops Courthouse, built open shop
This major open shop inroad came at a potentially volatile time and place. The project’s construction and the controversy surrounding it overlapped with a provincial election in May – during which Bill Bennett’s Social Credit government defied expectations and increased both its share of the popular vote and its seat count (setting the scene for its restraint program and a conflict with the broader labour movement later in the year).
Kamloops was also very much a blue collar and union town, although Richmond and Bud Smith – the Premier Bill Bennett staffer who later represented Kamloops as an MLA – said the local political dynamics were not entirely as one might assume.
While unions opposed the Socred government, and its willingness to award projects open shop, those views were not universally shared among local rank-and-file union members. Getting Socreds elected in Kamloops would have been impossible otherwise.
“A lot of them supported Claude, [former Kamloops MLAs] Rafe Mair and Phil Gaglardi because they understood if you don’t have projects, you don’t have work,” Smith said. Many, he adds, were also willing to “stick their union card in their shoe” and work on the courthouse project. “The dynamic is not a union/anti-union thing,” said Smith. “It’s a work and opportunity thing.”
Local election results in 1983, when Richmond recalls being declared elected just 10 minutes after the polls closed, back up that assessment. And supporters did sometimes step up publicly, including a parade of logging trucks through Kamloops after the effigy incident. Richmond said this was put on by independent logging contractors, many of whom also picked up construction work in the off-season and objected to the closed shop concept. But while there may well have been broad, if often silent, support for open tendering, it didn’t make it any less difficult for Kerkhoff to get the courthouse built. The controversy, as The Kamloops News put it, was “set to flare on several fronts”.
Interior of the Kamloops Courthouse
The tender for the project was handled through the Bid Depository System – an onerous process by which general contractors had to list sub-contractors who met prescribed criteria, and a barrier to many smaller and emerging open shop contractors. “It was a real monster, a good-old-boys club,” said Kerkhoff Project Manager Andy Krebs. The process resulted in a mix on Kerkhoff’s original roster of 12 unionized and six open shop sub-trades. That was consistent with the open shop philosophy, but posed a risk that one or more unions might invoke a non-affiliation clause and refuse to work alongside non-union workers, as was still commonly done at the time. The stakes were high, since the B.C. Building Corporation had required Kerkhoff to take responsibility for added costs due to labour disruptions.
Kerkhoff initially asked the unionized subs to get guarantees from their unions that there would be no labour disruptions. “We’re not prepared to give him the time of day,” replied Building Trades Council President Roy Gauthier. Kerkhoff then asked for the more moderate safeguard of being able to replace subs who could not, or would not, perform their contracts, and when that too was refused he re-tendered and brought in non-union subs. Krebs put it in these common-sense terms: “It’s pretty well known in the industry that we’re non-union and so [the unions] knew what they were getting into when they bid for our contracts. Why did they bid for the work if they don’t want to work alongside non-union workers?”
The project was also the subject of a certification drive, and what the Labour Relations Board termed a “multitude of applications” and a “complex and protracted dispute” involving various employers and unions. A consent order in April certified the Carpenters and Labourers Unions as bargaining agent for employees of a Kerkhoff sub-contractor, although an application for a common-employer declaration relative to Kerkhoff Construction itself was withdrawn. But what they couldn’t certify, the unions and their supporters would certainly try to disrupt.
Bill Kerkhoff
Union pickets and pressure on suppliers made it impossible to source concrete for a 25-hour final pour from anywhere in the local region, said Project Superintendent Hermann Janzen. Rempel Bros. again came to the rescue by setting up an on-site mobile batch plant, although supplying it with sand and gravel was not easy. A local gravel pit owner was willing to provide the materials but not bring them on site, so Janzen had him dump them in an undeveloped lot in a nearby industrial park, from where he retrieved them. “If the union can shut down a public road with humans, then I can shut it down with sand and gravel,” he reasoned. There was also vandalism on the site, including one alarming incident in which a fire burned a large hole in the on-site office trailer. A timing device and a large amount of diesel oil was found, but the fire was fortunately quickly extinguished.
But by October 1984, when the opening ceremony for the building was held, it was clear that the efforts to disrupt the project had been ineffective and that Kerkhoff had delivered beyond expectations. A reference letter from the architect speaks to the competence and quality workmanship demonstrated, saying it had “dispelled any initial apprehensions I may have had toward recommending the use of a non-union contractor on a project of this size.” Bud Smith noted that the courthouse had been built “three or four million under budget” and several months ahead of schedule. As even an observer sympathetic to the building trades would note: “After the Kamloops Courthouse, the building trades’ claim to have an exclusive preserve on construction know-how would always ring a little false.”
“I think we proved that a building of this size can be done by non-union contractors, especially after the union contractors said we didn’t have the competence to do it,” Kerkhoff himself said at the time. “If those people had been here today to see how wonderful this building is they wouldn’t be saying those things again.” The Kamloops Courthouse was a significant victory for open shop.
